Riveting and Inspiring

‘Selma’ wisely depicts struggle for civil rights

David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr. and Carmen Ejogo as Coretta Scott King in ‘Selma,’ the major motion picture that just opened in Portland theaters and across the country. The movie is poised to become of the most critically and popularly lauded films of the year.

I long for more films that attempt to tell the stories of genuine courage and struggle and sacrifice that are the stuff of all the most important gains in civil rights for minorities and women and LGBTQ people and others who are marginalized. Such stories get far less attention than they deserve. But every time a film comes out that purports to deal with such topics, I brace for disappointment. Such films nearly always oversimplify the struggles depicted, so that the villains are cartoonish or the struggles themselves more easily resolved than they ever can be in real life.

What a treat, then, to watch “Selma”—and by a treat, I mean that I was riveted and inspired, and that I wept through most of it. For once, I found an insightful depiction of what working for social justice looks like. And what it looks like is broken bodies, fear, treachery, risk, mistakes, choices between terrible options, and unthinkable sacrifice. And it involves many heroes, not just one.

The film has an interesting back story. It was stalled in development for several years, and several well-known directors signed on and then dropped the project. Its star, David Oyelowo, felt called to play Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. back in 2007, but some of the early directors were not convinced he was right for the role. By the time director Lee Daniels became the fourth director to abandon the project, Oyelowo had been cast, and it was he who convinced the producers to bring on Ava DuVernay as director. She is one of very few women of any color to get the opportunity to helm a major Hollywood studio project and, if there is any justice in Hollywood (dare I hold my breath?) is poised to become the first African-American woman to win an Oscar nod. And she hails from the world of independent film.

I have to believe that DuVernay’s perspective and experiences helped this project. The usual mix of leadership hasn’t been able to pull off a film like this; all the cards of how a Hollywood film gets made are stacked against the necessary clarity of vision. The challenges of telling stories of the Civil Rights Movement include that the work is not finished, but we want to believe that it is. Fifty years after the events depicted in this film, there have not been biopics of black leaders of the movement, and most of the film treatments of the subject have been told from the perspective of white characters. Even non-film celebrations of Dr. King’s legacy tend to focus on him to the exclusion of other leaders and to celebrate his oratory divorced from the context of his words.

But social justice movements are not born of single heroes. They always depend on the actions of scores of brave individuals—real people who alternate between fear and courage, between clarity and confusion—who take courageous action with no hope of recognition and no assurance of success. Leaders work among other leaders, and they make mistakes too. They may neglect their families, or minimize the contributions of marginalized members of their own group. Yet those same leaders also have moments of clarity, and their disagreements may help them to fumble toward bold strategies that succeed despite long odds. Director DuVernay works from a place of understanding these truths, and her position of relative disadvantage as a woman of color working in the film industry can only have helped her to grasp them.